Mortality & Mental Health

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318895.php

It's a Monday so what better day of the week to write about mortality and mental health. Death, other peoples that we are not intimately connected with have entered our 'living rooms' since the advent of 24 hour news. We all knew subconsciously that other people were dying, but we didn't know them, they were on a different continent, it was a war that had nothing to do with us so we didn't care. The trouble was we did care. We cared too much but we didn't know what to do with that generalised anxiety. The good news story at the end about the hamster learning how to juggle alleviated our concerns slightly but there was always a niggle that would return "When would it be our turn?" What has happened recently is that 'death' has been turned up a notch with ISIL and their televised You Tube barbarity playing on our subconscious fears. Do people in poorer countries who have had bombs dropped on them fear death less than those in wealthy countries. The wealthy 1% have been building bunkers to escape to, if the shit hits the fan. My specific interest in writing this post is a link with mental health. There must be one. I have death anxiety  I must have or I wouldn't be writing this. My anxiety revolves around the impending deaths of those close to me and then to a more selfish and personal death anxiety, the neurosis related to an 'unlived life'. I have not truly lived and this is what my own personal anxiety relates to. Knowing that at one particular time in the future, that all our collective lights will be extinguished, perhaps leads to this desperate scrambling to fill our lives with stuff, occasions, more stuff, more people to carry on our lineage and the equally desperate succour to be convinced that there will be a life for us after death because this one is so shit. I cannot be alone in this thinking but I have never heard it discussed in mental health circles "The reason that I am mad is that I am scared to die or that I am scared to continue with an unlived and unlivable life" As a layperson who has read a few psychology books I am more convinced now than when I began, that the threat of death underpins much of our collective madness and insanity and instead of being comforted by the news reports of mass deaths, we are even more disturbed by it because these deaths are more and more senseless. Death needs to make sense. Death needs to be the price we pay for a full, kind and caring life not for a selfish one. So when we receive the news that innocents are killed we are outraged because they have not been given the opportunity to lead a full, kind and caring life because it has been snatched away by the selfish ones.